Greetings from the sickbay

 Hey everybody and Happy 2023!

As many of you know, I've been away from the workshop for this entire month. And that's because I started this new year by breaking my arm. I slipped on icy street and broke my right arm from two different locations. It required a surgery, there's a fair sized chunk of metal holding the bones together, and no, as far as I know, it's not Adamantium.

I am hopefully getting the cast off Monday the Feb 6th, but quite frankly I also can't imagine doing actual workshop duties with hand for couple more weeks after that. So, no lathe or mill projects advancing for a while. And this latest hand calamity leads me into more serious announcement:

Ox Works is not going to accept custom orders anymore.

It sounds crazy, and the decision wasn't easy for me either. Because I like making custom machined metal hilts, and they're hands down the best selling items from my 'shop too. But the reasons for halting that business started to weight in more.

I used to have a CNC lathe, but after 2021 I've been working with manual tools only. Such as lathe, mill, etc. And this means producing one hilt takes longer time (albeit easier, since there's no need to type CNC code for the job), and in a very good workshop month I could finish maybe three, sometimes four empty hilts. If you know how much my average hilts cost, you can do the math how much I could potentially earn per month. That's right, making custom hilts is more an expensive hobby than serious business. I can guarantee that.

And unfortunately, the longer I've been an entrepreneur, the fewer 'good' months I've had.

For example, my entire latter half of 2022 was ridden with millions of Darth Real Life errands. Either I or someone else in the family was sick (always automatically drops my workshop time to nil), there were cars to service, lots of household chores, snow to plow, hardware problems in the 'shop, birthday parties to arrange, various other fires to put out and whatnot. I'm sure many of my customers noticed the slow progression of jobs, and my lack of correspondence.

I am really sorry about that, but all the extracurricular chores started to exhaust me by the start of November 2022, and I simply had to bench most of the metal hilt projects and shift my focus more into business development. The month before that had been particularly difficult, I had started with one, relatively simple budget hilt, but the customer kept asking for upgrades and changes into the hilt, often when the hilt was about 95% finished. Now, the customer has every right to do so, and I'm here to serve my customers. But after three weeks I noticed I had tied up my energy and resources on a project which would return me less than 100€. And that's not very sustainable, from business perspective.

The next project I rushed, as I was racing due dates of my insurance bill, and thus ended up botching it. So I had to sell it at lower cost, as grade B kit. The third hilt turned out great, but once it was finished the customer did not pay.

My apologies if this makes me sound too ‘commercial’ or ‘capitalist’, I know many of you dislike that kind of thinking, especially these days. But the fact is I also have to get my bills paid and maybe grow a bit of pension fund at the same time. Because my other job is barely keeping my head above the water.

I'm not 100% sure yet which direction I will start guiding Ox Works this year, as the process is constantly fluctuating. But the silver lining is, I will still make empty metal hilts when I can, then post it for sale into my Etsy store! I do have a pretty good idea of what my customers want, so you'll probably see some very familiar hilt models in my boutique soon. Possibly a hilt or two per month pace, but we'll see.

And I also hope this post wont remain the last one in this blog, because I have a lot of interesting musings to share, regarding my workshop and entrepreneurship in general.

'Til next time then!

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